


The names we bear

by Kes



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Family, Gen, Grandparents & Grandchildren, Grief/Mourning, Leia's complicated feelings, Parent-Child Relationship, Siblings, Skywalker Family Feels, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 05:36:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5993485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia Organa refuses the name of Skywalker, but she is part of the Skywalker line all the same.</p><p>This was born out of me wanting to write one of Shmi's descendents visiting her burial place, and ended up an exploration of Leia's feelings about her family, Anakin Skywalker, the Skywalker legacy, her own history, the Force, and the Skywalker family saga. What can I say, I really like Leia, I really like Shmi, I really like writing about the Skywalkers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The names we bear

A few days after the Battle of Endor, Luke calls her Skywalker. “Leia Skywalker,” he says, like it’s nothing, like it’s a given, like there’s nothing in the heady air of victory to poison that name for her.

Leia draws herself up to her full height and snaps at him as she hasn’t for years. “Don’t ever call me that. Ever.” He looks hurt. “Skywalker, Vader, they’re the same thing, and I will not insult my true parents by throwing away the name they shared with me for the name of the man who was part of their murder.”

Having a brother is nice. She’d never wondered about it, never considered it, but now it’s happened to her she has to concede she rather likes it and has done for the last few years. She could have done without finding out he was actually her biological twin. The price for siblinghood is having Darth Vader’s blood in her body and she hates it. If he’d tried to call them both Amidala, she might have stood for that, taken it as a middle name – but not Skywalker. Never Skywalker.

So she remains Leia Organa. There is no question of changing it. Bail and Breha Organa are her parents and she will bear their name with pride and honour it in the new world they gave their lives for. Luke remains Luke Skywalker, because of course he does, the galaxy’s miracle child, light born of darkness, and when he calls her sister strangers assume it is metaphorical. If Anakin Skywalker had had another child, they think, surely the world would know about it.

The name lies between them like a lightsaber. Luke tells her in awed tones about the light he saw in ‘our father’ and she bites back acid. Light or no light, it’s what you do that matters, and sometimes she still wakes up sweating like she’s back in that tiny cell. It’s why she stops him giving her Jedi training after a few months. Maybe you have to be desert-born to see the distinction of light and dark as anything less than dangerous, as anything less than a way to blame your own decisions on a cosmic force that influences them.

She believes in the Force. It’s in her, just as it’s in him. She can use it, and does. She just doesn’t believe that the light can save them. Once, she tries to tell him that. “It wasn’t the Light, Luke. It was you.”

“If the Dark had consumed him he wouldn’t even have seen me. Wouldn’t have cared.”

“And yet he certainly never saw me,” she says under her breath, and gives up. Darth Vader is nothing but a sick enigma and a lesson about the need for humanitarian aid and human rights interventions on the outlying planets to her. He’s a cautionary tale and a nightmare, but he’s not hers, and she refuses to care about him. She is not Leia Skywalker.

-

Fourteen years after the Battle of Endor, Leia looks at her son – an odd misfit of a boy, closed-off, sad when he thinks she isn’t looking, hissing with anger and pride that mirrors her own when he knows she is, plagued by something she cannot hold out – and makes an objective, rational decision. Ben Organa is not Leia Organa. He has different needs. He cannot deal with his Force sensitivity as she has, by relentlessly subsuming it beneath her unquenchable selfness. Instead, he needs to learn to use it as a tool, as a weapon against his tormenter, something external – just as Luke does. Her personal prejudices cannot be allowed to interfere with her son’s wellbeing.

“Aren’t you ashamed of being related to him?” he asks, and her heart sinks. When she had told him – because she had to, because so little about their lives made sense without it, no matter how much she wanted to spare him – she had told him not to tell anyone. That wasn’t what she meant.

“No, Ben.” Han could have done this better, but they’ve argued too many times about this. “Luke’s a good man and a wise one, and one of my great friends. He’ll be able to help, I promise. I don’t talk about being his sister because I don’t need the whole galaxy to know we’re related to Darth Vader. He hurt us enough in his lifetime, I’m not going to let him do it from beyond the grave.”

The way Ben stares back at her troubles her. “I’m not ashamed of him,” he declares, and should she keep forcing him to be? He never felt the sharp edges of Vader’s suit digging in through a thin layer of fabric while a green beam shot through the sky to – no. Does that sort of genetic shame hurt a child? Is it too late already – has she lost her chance to make him truly free of Vader as she cannot be? “He was powerful.”

That’s dangerous, and for a moment mistrust of Luke makes her stomach twist wildly – but she refuses to mistrust the brother she chose, despite their shared blood. She might not agree with all his views on Vader, but he is a good man and he will not allow her son to idolise him. Perhaps a few stories about how the best thing Vader did in his life was turn to the light, despite all the pressure arrayed against him, will help Ben. She wants to rip that alien thing that plays on him out by the roots, but she cannot grip it.

Three months later, he starts signing his letters Ben Skywalker Organa.

-

Sixteen years after the Battle of Endor, Leia is staring numbly at a comm screen freezing herself one lacerating heartbeat at a time. No-one will stand near her. Not even Han. Not even he will face this with her.

Leia is not speaking to Luke. Leia cannot speak to Luke. If Leia speaks to Luke she will shatter.

Luke is crying, trying to explain, but he’s burning with a grief and horror she can feel from three systems away and she cannot let the fire touch her or she will lose her edges. She has done this before. She has lost everything before. You freeze and you hibernate until it’s safe to thaw.

Leia can see the burning remains of the school behind Luke where he sits slumped and blood-spattered, hopeless in his battered hooded robe. He’s done this before too, but she cannot help him, not this time. If he cannot hold himself together he will have to break. In front of that there’s a row of neat little pyres, so horrifyingly small. She knows most of the people whose children lie there. She is the last parent he contacted. Han is still on the other side of the room.

-

Eighteen years after the Battle of Endor, Leia is still alive. She’s alone again. Alone as she has never been since she waited for death in the cells of – no. She’s doing what she’s always done and carrying on – we have no time for griefs. The destruction of the new Jedi, disappearance of Luke Skywalker, and the rise of a dangerous new faction in the galaxy with ‘Kylo Ren’ - with her son - as its swordarm leaves her with a thousand things to do, and that isn’t counting all the ongoing problems.

This problem is on Tatooine. She hates the place, but her personal feelings will not interfere with her duty. If they did, she would be hunting the space-lanes for her menfolk, first Lando, to help her with Han, then the two of them to help with Luke, then all four of them to find Ben. But she is Leia Organa, the last of the heroes of Endor, and she will not fail the New Republic, child of her work, as she believes she failed the child of her body.

It’s a vain hope that leads her out into the desert beyond Tosche Station. Luke will not have gone home – but she has to check. The Lars settlement hasn’t been touched, like the miasma of the Empire and the Dark Side clings to it tight enough to keep most people away. Not even the Sand People have taken it over. There are two pyresite memorials outside, not yet covered by the sand, that she recognises now as Luke’s work. She wonders when he made them.

Leia walks on, calls his name a couple of times, just in case. When she finishes her circuit, she approaches the pyresites, and realises the ground beneath her feet isn’t the ordinary sand-rock. The speeder had come with a sand-blower, so she takes it out and blasts the sand from atop the too-smooth rock.

Another set of pyresites. Lirain Lars. Baram Akert. Cliegg Lars. And. Her heart thumps. Shmi Skywalker.

Abruptly, she kneels and clears the last of the sand off by hand. Shmi Skywalker. What the blackened pyre marker doesn’t say, she fills in from her own knowledge. Born a slave, freed here, and died at the hands of Tusken raiders in the arms of her son. A woman of wisdom and principle, tough in the way you had to be to survive this desert hellscape. Beloved wife and – mother. Mother to Anakin Skywalker, and Leia’s own grandmother. Calling this woman grandmother does not feel an insult to Luela Organa and Bethia Magila. There is something here, some old worn dent in the Force, as though Shmi’s ghost had tried to linger in some way.

“What did we do wrong?” Leia asks the emptiness. Shmi had not lived to see what her son became, and she envied her that – but perhaps her ghost had known, before it faded. There was nobody living who could tell her what Shmi Skywalker might have said in response. “I thought I was doing right. So did you, I suppose. Do we lose them when we send them away, or is it before then? Or after?”

A part of her understands Luke better, staring at the last memorial for a woman she’ll never know who loved Anakin Skywalker the way she loves Ben Organa.

This is the final resting place of the start of it all; the galactic slave trade is impossible to trace ancestry through, for all Luke tried during the push to crush it. Shmi Skywalker came from somewhere, but the secret had gone with her to the grave, and she had brought her son forth from nowhere. Leia is never sure if she believes that. Would Padme Amidala have claimed virgin birth, if she had lived? Leia might, in her position.

Shmi had been freed here by the man who would become her husband. The idea made Leia’s skin crawl, the same way the digging whispers of he that had ensnared her son did. Luke said Beru said she loved him, but Leia knows that for the unfree the heart is a dangerous thing to show. She learned that at the hands of Tarkin.

“Who were you?” Leia had spent every Primeday morning at the Magila house; her father would come in with her for a brief chat with his mother, and then leave her there to dine with the old lady, dig through her jewellery boxes, and climb trees in the garden. Later on he’d pick her up and they’d return to the palace, and she would visit Luela Organa’s suite, learn ancient Alderaanian songs, and go to sleep to her cracked voice telling her stories. After the Battle of Endor, she’d sat down with Mon Mothma and tracked down the Naberries, stayed at their peaceful lakeside home for a week. She still keeps the little scraps of wisdom Ruwee was fond of teasing her in her thoughts.

Shmi Skywalker is the only grandmother she has never known. It would have been a different sort of meeting, out here in the desert where the most hospitality you’ll get is clean water. Would they have had anything to say to each other, the slave and the princess, even if neither of them were precisely that anymore?

For Shmi’s sake, and so her own, Leia says, “In the end, he turned, your son. He saw Luke, he watched Luke bleed and plead and trust him, and he made himself worthy of it. He turned back to the light.”

Leia wonders if one day, she will be able to say that to herself.

They stay like that a while, the first of the Skywalker name and the one that tried to escape it, and then Leia gets up and climbs back on the speeder, zooms out of the desert that made them.


End file.
